Google I/O 2023: all the news from Google’s big developer event

The words “it looks like you’re writing a letter, would you like some help with that?” didn’t appear at any point during Google’s recent demo of its AI office suite tools. But as I watched Aparna Pappu, Google’s Workspace leader, outline the feature onstage at I/O, I was reminded of a certain animated paperclip that another tech giant once hoped would help usher in a new era of office work.

Even Microsoft would acknowledge that Clippy’s legacy is not wholly positive, but the virtual assistant is forever associated with a particular period of work — one packed to the brim with laborious emails, clip art, and beige computers with clunking hard drives. Now, work has changed — it’s Slack pings, text cursors jostling in a Google Doc, and students who don’t know what file systems are — and as generative AI creeps into our professional lives, both Google and Microsoft are recognizing that it’s calling for a new era of tools to get things done. 

Of all the emotions I expected out of this week’s Google I/O keynote, “dread” was not on my short list. Google has spent a couple of decades creating products that make my life easier. This week, it demonstrated the exact opposite: a way to make communicating with other people worse.

Google I/O, this year, was focused on artificial intelligence, and one of its centerpieces was prompt-based text generation, particularly in Google’s office suite. At several points throughout the keynote, it demoed a system called “Help me write” — which rewrites simple prompts in Gmail and other apps as more polished paragraphs of text. But more polished doesn’t automatically mean better.

There was a chilly marine layer hanging in the air above the Shoreline Amphitheater, but the danceable beats thumped on in spite of it. Dan Deacon was playing a set that had something to do with AI, followed by a person in a duck costume dancing on stage. Not the kind of spectacle you’re typically expecting before you’ve even had your second cup of coffee, but that’s Google I/O, baby. 

I/O is, of course, the company’s yearly developer conference, and it officially kicked off on Wednesday morning when CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage, headlining a two-hour presentation that was almost entirely centered on AI. We got a preview of what’s coming to Google Search, Gmail, and Photos, along with an unappetizing, photo-realistic image of pizza fondue. It was all AI, top to bottom. We were reassured, again and again, that Google is being responsible with its AI implementation and that the company is taking steps to make sure the technology doesn’t end life on the planet as we know it.

I don’t give a damn about the bezels. Just let me get that part of Google’s new $1,799 Pixel Fold out of the way. They’re fine. And I’m absolutely on board with the squat form factor: having this phone / tablet hybrid feel like a notepad in hand when it’s closed seems like a far better solution than Samsung’s tall boy.

The Galaxy Fold 4 is too narrow for us large-handed humans, and when opened up, its square-ish inner display leaves sizable black bars when watching videos. In his Pixel Fold hands-on, my colleague Dan Seifert found Google’s wider aspect ratio to feel more natural for multitasking.

There are some who will tell you that Ask Jeeves was right all along. I’m less sure that’s true. In fact, I am starting to think that if you are a technical person who is considering a startup, Google’s fascination with adding a slow and unreliable AI chat to its results is an opening for you to put a brick on the gas pedal and absolutely run Google over.

Ask Jeeves launched in 1997, and the idea was that you’d type a natural-language query into the box, and the valet would come back with an answer. (Jeeves is named for P.G. Wodehouse’s famous character, a near-omniscient man with a “feudal spirit.” Disclosure: my cat is also named for this character.) It was popular until Google Search entered the scene — an engine with a better ability to crawl the web, among its other strengths.

It wouldn’t be Google I/O if the company didn’t have a new version of its smartphone and tablet operating system waiting in the wings — and while Android 14 got totally upstaged by AI and the company’s first folding phone, we’ve since learned more from the company’s developer sessions.

Don’t get too excited: these changes are subtle! But here are a few ways Google’s “Upside Down Cake” might make your life slightly sweeter when it arrives this fall.

With the arrival of the Pixel Tablet with a charging speaker dock at Google I/O this week, Google did what it does best: killed a product. Only this time, it didn’t just kill its product; it foreshadowed the death of the entire smart display category. Ah well. They had a good run, but folks, it’s the end of the line. The precise time of death was when Google exec Rose Yao described the new Pixel Tablet on its dock like this: “It feels like a smart display, but it has one huge advantage … Android apps.” 

When one of really only two companies that make smart displays proudly proclaims that its shiny new smart home control device is not a smart display, the game is up. Yao also correctly pointed out one of two major problems with smart displays: their software is frustratingly limited. The other problem? Their hardware is bad, too. That’s a powerful double blow.

The single most visited page on the internet is undergoing its most radical change in 25 years. 

On Wednesday, Google introduced a major overhaul of its search results page that infuses the screen with AI. Called the Search Generative Experience (SGE), the new interface makes it so that when you type a query into the search box, the so-called “10 blue links” that we’re all familiar with appear for only a brief moment before being pushed off the page by a colorful new shade with AI-generated information. The shade pushes the rest of Google’s links far down the page you’re looking at — and when I say far, I mean almost entirely off the screen.

The arrival of ChatGPT last year sent a rare shiver through Google’s spine. For years the company had positioned itself as a leader in the development in artificial intelligence. Suddenly, though, a product from the upstart OpenAI rocketed to tens of millions of monthly users — and observers began asking whether Google had squandered its lead.

Within weeks, leaders at the company declared a “code red” — a signal that the time to begin shipping AI features was now. (It was widely reported that CEO Sundar Pichai declared the code red, but he later told me that it wasn’t the case.)

I’m not surprised; I’m just disappointed.

As expected, Google launched the Pixel Tablet at its Google I/O developer conference yesterday. It’s an 11-inch Android tablet with a “charging speaker dock,” and when it’s on the dock, it looks and functions like a Nest Hub Max, Google’s top-of-the-line smart display. Google kept saying the Pixel Tablet was “like” a smart display, while insisting that it isn’t one.

Google’s freshly expanded Find My Device platform has two new trackers coming from Chipolo: the One Point key finder and the Card Point wallet finder. While these trackers are dedicated to Google’s location tracking service, Chipolo also offers similar One Spot and Card Spot trackers for Apple’s Find My service.

The names here are fairly self-explanatory. The new Card Point wallet finder resembles a thick credit card that slips into your purse or wallet, while the One Point key finder is a puck-shaped keyring. The latter is small enough to use in other circumstances though, such as keeping tabs on your luggage, bike, or even on a pet collar.

Google and Taito are partnering on a new augmented reality version of the arcade classic Space Invaders. The new game, Space Invaders: World Defense, will use Google tools like ARCore and newly-announced Geospatial Creator to let AR Space Invaders aliens fly around real-world locations.

Based on a GIF in a Google tweet, it appears you’ll play the game kind of like a shooting gallery. In the GIF, a handful of aliens appear near and around a static city image, and a reticle appears so that the player can blast the aliens out of the sky. I get the sense this footage might not be fully representative of the final game, though — it kind of looks like the aliens have just been animated over a stock photo.

Google’s taken a page from Samsung’s book and made itself a foldable phone. In fact, the newly announced Google Pixel Fold, shown off at Google I/O 2023 alongside the Pixel 7A and Pixel Tablet, looks as if it borrowed a few chapters from Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 4. The foldables share a fairly striking resemblance since Google opted for the phone-unfolds-into--tablet method of design philosophy and an equally lofty $1,799.99 starting price. However, when you look just a little closer, you notice some stark differences.

Here, we’re pitting the two folding ultra-flagships up against one another to compare their specs and features on paper. While Samsung is on its fourth iteration of the Galaxy Fold, Google will be a first-time player in the world of foldable phones when the Pixel Fold launches in late June. But can Google really even compete with a first-gen product?

Google is officially back in the tablet business. After teasing it a year ago, the company has now announced the Pixel Tablet, a $499 slab that’s available for preorder starting today, May 10th, and will begin shipping on June 20th.

Google’s history with tablets has been, well, fraught. The only real success it’s had was with the Nexus 7, a cheap, small tablet that was beloved when it came out back in 2012. The subsequent years saw the company try lots of ideas on portable touchscreen computers, launching new tablets with either Android or ChromeOS and then abandoning them shortly after. None ever recaptured the success of the Nexus 7. It even got to the point where Google’s head of hardware said it wouldn’t bother making new tablets anymore in 2019.

The new Pixel Fold wasn’t the only smartphone Google introduced during this year’s Google I/O keynote. The budget-friendly Pixel 7A, a phone that essentially functions as a stripped-down version of last year’s Pixel 7, is already available at multiple retailers for $499.

At 6.1 inches, Google’s latest Pixel phone is just as small as its predecessor, the Pixel 6A, but this year, it comes with a few extra perks not present on the last-gen model. That includes support for wireless charging, a new chipset, and a higher-refresh display for smoother scrolling — factors that surely play into the phone’s $50 price increase.